Grindelwald, Switzerland is shockingly beautiful. It’s nestled in a valley in the Swiss Alps and is surrounded by mountains, including a few famous peaks like the Eiger and Jungfrau. Since we drove down with the dogs, we booked an apartment hotel, and ended up in a Swiss chalet apartment with a nice patio view of four mountains, including Eiger and a glacier. Like most things in Grindelwald, the hotel was on a pretty steep hill, and our apartment was down the hill from the main hotel space, so breakfast and other hotel amenities (like the cake happy hour!) required a five minute walk uphill, but it was worth it. There were also plenty of trails and paths for us to walk the dogs, as long as we were okay with hills.
One of the first things we figured out is that we had packed the wrong things for this visit. We had been tracking temperatures and looked up a bunch of information, but we packed for temps in the 50s and 60s during the day, and what we got the first couple of days was bright, sunny, 70s. Despite all of our research, we also didn’t realize that pretty much everything was hiking — even just walking around town or walking the dogs — because of how steep the hills were.
Once we were getting ready to go to our first outing I also realized that we really needed a backpack, which was frustrating, since I had looked right at our regular back pack when we were packing and thought “nah, we’re not going to need it” and left it behind. Luckily, the gondola station for our first tourist attraction was right next to a mountain bike store, so we were able to duck in and buy a fancy outdoorsy backpack, which I’m pretty sure is going to see a lot of use across Europe.
One of the hardest things about planning this trip was deciding what to do — there were so many options that looked amazing that we had to prioritize our list. We also decided to mark one of the most famous options — visiting Jungfrau Joch (Europe’s Top of the World, which includes an ice palace), off the list because we won’t have warm jackets until we get our household goods. We also knew pretty quickly that we would be planning a return trip to Grindelwald, so we decided to save that stop for a future trip.
Grindelwald First
It looks like “first” to English readers, but it’s pronounced “fierst”. After a very long gondola ride up the mountain we finally got to the First location. There was a short cliff walk along one of the cliffs, a restaurant, places to rent mountain bikes, many hiking trails, the most popular of of which was the 60 minute hike to an alpine lake called Balchapsee, and several thrill activities like a mountain chair swing and paragliding, and a couple of options to ride down the mountain on paved paths on either mountain carts or Trotti bikes.
We started with the cliff walk, then stood in a line for almost an hour to get to the photo spot at the end of the cliff walk. After that we had a snack and beer and bought a sandwich to take to an alpine lake called Bachalpsee with us. It was much warmer than we were expecting, which made the walk a little unpleasant, but ultimately it was fine and the views were amazing.
Once we finished resting and taking photos of the amazing alpine lake, we headed back to the gondola area, which was a much easier hike in that direction since it was more steadily downhill and it had cooled off just a little bit. We looked at taking the mountain carts or Trotti bikes back down the hill, but the line wait time was really long for the carts, and we just missed the cut-off time for the Trotti bikes. Now that we have a better idea of how it all works though, we can definitely plan a little better for next time.
Insta-Posers
One thing that surprised us though, was the Instagram era of visiting a scenic spot. Every single beautiful location had dozens of people doing the same instagram poses — over and over and over again. Boyfriends and girlfriends and parents and selfie sticks and random strangers pressed into service to take several dozen photos of various poses — arms spread wide from the front, then from the back; sitting peacefully with their back to the camera; peace signs; from the left side, from the right side, from below; with the hat, without the hat; sunglasses on/off; sweater tied around shoulders, sweater on, sweater tossed to the side…
Watching a few of them you could just see the inspirational quote or statement about being in a such a beautiful place and just taking time to really soak it in… when the truth was that they waited patiently for other insta posers to get out of the way, so they could take as many pictures as possible before moving to the next scenic overlook and starting all over again. It’s a little hard to hate on them too much since we also stood in a line for the better part of an hour to get a scenic photo of the two of us, but after the first dozen photos or so it seems like a little bit of overkill.
Pfingstegg
It was supposed to rain the afternoon of our second day, so we planned a more easy going day. We started by going back to the bike shop where we bought the backpack, and got a pair of hiking shorts for Chris and a sun hat for me, for Eiger the next day. Once we had checked out a few of the other shops in town we spent some time figuring out the busses and rode back up to the stop right by our apartment.
After taking the dogs out again and changing, we walked down the hill to the Pfingsteg station to ride the gondola up the hill. When we got to the platform the gondola was already really full of people, so we expected to be told to wait for the next one — instead the guy impatiently told us and the other group of 5 people that there was plenty of room and we should get in because the next one wouldn’t leave for a while.
Luckily the ride up the hill was only about 5 minutes and really smooth, because we were packed in there like sardines. Because it was starting to sprinkle a bit we went straight for the toboggan run, followed by the fly line before it started seriously raining. After that we grabbed lunch on the patio, and were luckily tucked up under the eave of the building once the rain started coming down more. Since the only other real option for that area was hiking and we weren’t dressed for it (especially hiking in the rain) we took the (less crowded) gondola back down the hill. The skies opened up while we were waiting for our bus, and we got to watch dozens of tourists scurry for shelter without any rain clothes or umbrellas. Even with our rain jackets we were getting pretty soaked, so we moved under an awning to wait for the bus.
Interlaken
Once we were back at the hotel room we debated what to do, and ultimately decided on checking out the hotel cake happy hour and just settling in our room to enjoy the view from our patio and hang out with the dogs. Instead, the skies cleared up while we were eating our cake, and I pushed for us to take a quick train trip to Interlaken to check it out.
I had a few motivations for the trip:
1. We had bought horribly expensive travel passes for the area, at the recommendation of pretty much every person we talked to and review we read. But we booked them for too many days, and with our way of traveling (I.e. taking it easy and not trying to see all the things during one trip) we weren’t going to get our moneys worth. The train trip was included though, so would chip at it.
2. I also wanted to at least see Interlaken to decide if we would want to stay there when we came back — that very quick trip was enough for me to say “nope” because it was even more touristy and crowded than Grindelwald, and didn’t have the amazing mountain views.
3. I wanted to go to a Swiss chocolate store because our hotel front desk said there wasn’t a chocolate store in Grindelwald. They were wrong, we passed it on the walk to the train station, but by then I was committed.
4. It was a train ride through the Swiss alps, so even if we were tired, it would still be pretty amazing.
The trip wasn’t that bad, but it certainly wasn’t a highlight of our stay here. The train was pretty crowded with people who had taken a day trip to Grindelwald and it started raining again shortly after we boarded. Interlaken was bigger and much more crowded than we were expecting, and a lot of the appeal seemed to be shopping, which has never been our favorite tourist activity. I’m still glad we went though, since it firmly established that we wouldn’t want to stay in Interlaken for our next trip to the Swiss Alps.
Eiger
Our final full day in Switzerland for this trip was reserved for Eiger. Our plan was to take the gondola up to the station, have lunch and a specific cake, Rahmschnitte, at the restaurant there, and then hike back down on the Eiger trail, while checking out spectacular views. Instead it was foggy — very, very foggy.
We didn’t let that stop us in the end — we rode the gondola up, had lunch and cake, and then hiked back down the mountain. However, we asked two different people for directions to the
Eiger trail, and both of them pointed us to the Kleine Scheidegg trail instead. We decided to go with it, walking through the fog and mist, until we got to the Kleine Scheidegg train station. There we had a choice — continue hiking to the Alpiglen station, which is where we would have ended up in the Eiger trail, or just take the train back down from Kleine Sheidegg. In the end we opted for the train since we had dinner reservations and the views weren’t super spectacular. It was still a nice walk though. And I’m glad we did it.
Cows
One of the funny things about Switzerland were the number of cow souvenirs. Ultimately it makes sense — every cow in the mountains wears a large cow bell, which serves two purposes: 1. It makes them easier to find the 9 months out of the year when blizzards are possible, and 2. The cows aren’t kept in individual pastures — instead all the local cows are given free range over the mountain, and each farmer has a distinct bell on their cows to identify them.
Since a couple of the most famous Swiss tourist exports are cheese and chocolate, which mostly depend on cow milk, there were also a lot of cows, which meant every gondola ride or hike around the hills included hearing the ever present cow bells as the cows lived their best life in the mountains.
Our hotel apartment was *very* cow themed. A fake cow head above the coat rack. Carved cows and herders in the bed frame. A large relief of cow scenes above the stairs to the loft area. Cows next to the mirror and closet in the mud room. A motif in the dining area bench. Seriously - cows and cow-themed souvenirs everywhere.
We did in fact come home with a cow bell from Switzerland as a souvenir, but we resisted the urge to get a big one, and instead got a fairly small one that will easily hang on the Christmas tree.
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